What Does Paul Goodman Mean To Me?

What Does Paul Goodman Mean To Me?

Michael Walzer: What Does Paul Goodman Mean To Me?

The following talk was delivered at a panel with Jonathan Lee, Casey Blake, and Michael Fisher on Paul Goodman, during the U.S. Intellectual History Conference at CUNY this November. Cross-posted from the website for Paul Goodman Changed My Life.

I will start with criticism and end with praise.

I didn?t have an easy relationship with Paul. I was prejudiced before it began. I don?t really understand pacifism, and someone who was a pacifist in the Second World War is especially outside of my intellectual reach, perhaps my moral reach, too. And I distrusted or perhaps just disliked what seemed to me the arrogance with which he defended his political positions. Maybe he worried about them in private; in public he seemed utterly certain of his own rightness and of everyone else?s misunderstanding?or worse. Words like ?stupid? occur too often in The Paul Goodman Reader, which I?ve recently been looking through?and they almost always refer to?the rest of us, all of us. Paul didn?t think that we were naturally stupid; no, we had been made stupid by the educational and political systems. But stupid we were, and we proved our stupidity everyday by our refusal to rise up against the Cold War, nuclear deterrence, McCarthyism, and many other things. We provoked in Paul a kind of revulsion, as in this poem, written after the resumption of nuclear bomb testing in April, 1962:

My countrymen have now become too base,
I give them up. I cannot speak with men
not my equals?
How can I work? I hired out my pen
to make my country practical, but I can
no longer serve these people; they are worthless.

Paul wrote some beautiful poems, but there were also lines like these, which put me off, which still put me off. Nor could I ever get very far in his big novel Empire City, despite several attempts; it seemed to me more argument than story?though there were some very funny set pieces. And I thought that his account of academic life, A Community of Scholars (which I reviewed, very critically, in Dissent, earning a sharp response from Paul) was marred by his romantic view of medieval universities, by his failure to notice that their communal character, the intensity of their collegiality, the closeness of teachers and students, had something to do with the fact that they were burning heretics in those days, not arguing with them. Those medieval professors weren?t liberal or pluralist, not in their doctrine, not in their institutions?and liberal and pluralist is what universities have to be if they are to make room for people like Paul Goodman.

So he wasn?t a particularly nice person, and he wasn?t a great novelist, and he was a fine poet only sometimes, and his view of medieval intellectual life suggests that he wasn?t much of a historian–but, but, but?

He was a wonderfully imaginative social critic, and he wrote some books where every sentence is a surprise and a provocation. At the top of his game, which for me was when he was writing Communitas with his brother Percival, and when he was writing Growing Up Absurd, and when he was writing his utopian essays and practical proposals, his wildly practical and totally unlikely proposals?well, at the top of his game, he was marvelous.

And that kind of writing is especially valuable for socialists and social democrats like me, with our non-utopian essays and really practical proposals. Our politics makes a lot more sense than anarchism does, and it seems to me as much a threat to the powers-that-be?more of a threat actually, because sometimes we win. But we are often too sober, and we are often boring, even to ourselves. I don?t think that imagination is our strong point. We are better at worrying about our own views, better also at tolerating, even respecting, people who disagree with us. But we often miss possibilities beyond what is politically possible right now. We aren?t quick enough to grasp how different things could be, could usefully be. We admire efficiencies of scale, the benefits of bigness, and often fail to see the importance, and the value, of life in the small, local life, social action without a center (like the occupations, which Paul would have loved).

Caught up with bureaucracies and regulations, which are indeed necessary, even in social movements, we miss the pleasures and the spontaneous creativity of free association. And that?s what Paul wrote about and talked about?schools and cities and neighborhoods and every sort of human group, coping on its own with its own problems, governing itself. It is time to begin listening to him again, as Jonathan Lee?s lovely film invites us to do.